I would settle for a 2-track recording. 8 track would be nice, but 2 tracks are enough to create a quick demo to put up on the web or to give a copy to the dancers to practice with. I would suggest that MP3 or WMA encoding should be supported though, to compress the files.

With 8-track recording you have to be concerned about the amounts of audio data stored on the HD. Even if it is large enough, how easy is it to move it to another media? Over USB 1.1 moving a gigabyte of audio data would take over 15 minutes - impractical, and yet with 8 tracks of recording this would translate into less than 2 hrs of recording at 96 KHz at 24 bits. If someone really needs to do 8 track recording, they are better of using a PC, where they can also master their tracks, and burn them onto the CD. I certainly do not want to carry around the extra weight of the CD drive in my instrument.

Besides, why settle for the 8 tracks? With an arranger keyboard you need a lot more than that: 8 stereo accompaniment parts, 4 stereo realtime parts, lead vocal, stereo harmonies (preferrably output individually) - by my calculation 33 tracks right there.

I just don't think that a full-fledged studio-level recording is a feasible built-in option for a keyboard.

Regards,
Alex